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Title

Crossing the InnerSource Chasm

Patlet

Early InnerSource experiments have been successful. Methods that were successful convincing early teams stop working though when scaling the initiative. This chasm can be crossed by using different methods to reach people at different stages of the innovation curve.

Problem

Often InnerSource programs start as experiments. From there reaching early adopters and visionaries typically is easy. However the methods used to reach these innovation friendly associates typically stop working when trying to scale the initiative to pragmatists, conservatives or even sceptics. As a result scaling stalls and the entire initiative cannot live up to its potential.

Context

A corporation with teams on a wide spectrum of innovation friendliness has stared an InnerSource initiative. Goals are set, early experiments were successful, some teams are successfully using the new collaboration best practices.

However there are teams which are less innovation friendly. Maybe they are more risk averse than others. Maybe they prefer stable processes so they can focus on their daily engineering challenges. Maybe they prefer to follow a proven path instead of running into all of the hurdles that early adopters run into.

Forces

  • The goal is to increase collaboration, reduce duplication, increase knowledge sharing.
  • Some teams already adopted a lot of InnerSource best practices, often when doing so they had to fix hurdles within the organization when adopting a more collaborative way of working.
  • Some associates refuse to invest time in experimenting with new ways of working, preferring a stable environment.
  • There is too much time to get everyone on board individually.
  • Depending on where associates are on the innovation curve they are willing to invest different amounts of time to master a new way of working.

Solution

The InnerSource guidance group should make different offers for mastering InnerSource depending on where on the innovation scale employees are:

Steps for reaching innovators

  • Meet with people in person, in 1-on-1 settings, choose those in favour and those against and those interested in the topic to create a first network.
  • Start with InnerSource pilots.
  • Create a community of practice that operates according to the principles that you want to establish.
  • Bring innovators together so they can support each other.
  • Write down everything that you discuss in person or in calls so others that lack the time to join those calls can follow along, provide their input and you have a document that you can share with individuals following your trail.

Write down solutions to any problems you find along the way and share those written solutions with people following your trail.

Steps for reaching early adopters/ visionaries

  • Share results and learnings form retrospectives of InnerSource pilots.
  • Share external material (bonus points if that is material that colleagues created earlier: talks, blog articles, book chapters, magazine articles, videos etc.)
  • Co-create a document of shared InnerSource Principles.

Steps for pragmatists

  • Offer in-house and online training.
  • Establish local experts on topics in the teams you want to reach.
  • Provide an InnerSource strategy that is backed by higher level management.
  • Provide InnerSource cheat sheet in particular for those new to the company.
  • Provide teams with a self check to scale the initiative (see Maturity Model.

Steps for reaching conservatives

  • Include InnerSource training material in mandatory training courses for new hires.
  • Integrate any tooling and any experiments you have run into established company structures (e.g. GitHub/ GitLab instances are under a regular plan, accounts are easy to create and integrated with e.g. corporate single sign-on solutions, in-house support can provide help for these tools).
  • Provide low effort opportunities for learning (e.g. put little riddles in your coffee kitchen or whatever the digital alternative is for your company.)
  • Ship bite sized learning pieces to inboxes.
  • Pull in external expertise - sometimes in-house expertise counts much less than external statements.

Steps for laggards

  • Incorporate InnerSource into career competencies description.

Resulting Context

  • The InnerSource initiative can reach teams with various innovation preferences.
  • Overall InnerSource adoption improves.
  • Friction between teams decreases due to a common understanding.

Known Instances

TBD

Status

Initial

References